Automated Cross-Browser Compatibility Testing

With the advent of Web 2.0 applications and new browsers, the cross-browser compatibility issue is becoming increasingly important. Although the problem is widely recognized among web developers, no systematic approach to tackle it exists today. None of the current tools, which provide screenshots or emulation environments, speciﬁes any notion of cross-browser compatibility, much less check it automatically. In this paper, we pose the problem of cross-browser compatibility testing of modern web applications as a ‘functional consistency’ check of web application behavior across diﬀerent web browsers and present an automated solution for it. Our approach consists of (1) automatically analyzing the given web application under diﬀerent browser environments and capturing the behavior as a ﬁnite-state machine; (2) formally comparing the generated models for equivalence on a pairwise-basis and exposing any observed discrepancies. We validate our approach on several open-source and industrial case studies to demonstrate its eﬀectiveness and real-world relevance.